


south carolina, 1782.

by warmongerer



Series: the bullet. [1]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American Revolution RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Blood, Death and Dying, Existential contemplation, Gen, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Unfinished Business, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-05 21:17:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmongerer/pseuds/warmongerer
Summary: in the fields distant to chehaw point, john laurens dies, alone.( explores the finality of death and a life unfinished.m/m tagged for mentions of alexander hamilton. )





	

**Author's Note:**

> i have a fascination with these darlings and can't resist spending moments with them at their last. enjoy these moments. 
> 
> as noted in the series description, this and other similar writings will be a combination of historical information and Hamilton musical information from LMM. please remember historical inaccuracies may happen; they are purposeful.
> 
> comments and criticism welcome. if you note any errors, please let me know!
> 
> thank you for reading.

The clearest memory he has of his mother’s voice is distorted like a fever dream. She's soothing him through the swell of cicada song of cicadas. He had fled from their roar upon opening the door a late summer evening, run to cling to her skirts and press his face to the swell of her belly (swollen with promise of another sibling and heavy with fear that the promise was empty). She had leaned over him, a small boy who believed that the cacophony could only have come from terrible monsters rising from familiar trees, and had whispered in the shell of his ear, “tree crickets, mon petit amour. Ils chantent.”

( He never took to French well, not until many years later, when he learned it between two men who spoke it as a first language, with their encouragement and kind teasing. )

With the patient reassurance of his mother, her steadying hands on his trembling shoulders, he had turned once more to their music and found sounded like a church chorus, and he could find joy in listening to the thunderous appeal.

Now, with backdrop played by sun bearing light into ill-focused eyes and long grass obscuring his view in intermittent waves, their song begins again and vibrates in his bones like a hymnal. It carries forth memories the dirges he remembers playing in towering cathedrals in Switzerland, echoing across mortal minds to harken to finality. It feels appropriate to think of those youthful days, in this honeyed moment of time, thick with some weight like wine in his veins. Each moment stretches, carried on waves of summer insects singing. He breathes; it aches.

John Laurens knows, in the struggling chambers of his heart and the quietly closing echoes of his mind, that these are the last of his moments on this sweet summered earth. It feels appropriate that they should be on the emptied stretches of a battlefield, no matter the scale. Warriors do not die old and abed. They die with wine in their vines, gunpowder on their hands, and the knowledge that death does not punish them when they finally fall -- she expresses her gratitude as she guides them towards a final rest. 

In his veins, no wine thickens the rush, but the blood that turns the shade of his coat and smears thick on trampled glass -- oh, the richness of it! The richness of all this moment, the summer afternoon familiar like a hundred others he’s lived before-- he wheezes with what might have been a laugh at another time, even just the day before, body shuddering with muddled mirth. The bullets buried deep within flesh paint everything in streaks of severity, highlighting colors in new and burning shades. He fights for a breath, feels the dulled pain like a shot missed rather than a shot suffered, and knows he’s nearing the last breaths permitted to him. What does he hold to, in these final moments? What memory should he seek to carry himself into the after and other? How does he comfort his mortality and prepare his soul for whatever judgment may await?

His breath drags ragged through ruined lungs, reawakening the agony of his wounds, before he bites his coppered tongue and forces himself to ease into the earth again. He has earned repose, he so believes; he has fought his war, long and tarried, and he has fought every mile of it. He’s earned himself a moment to simply be. There are things to do, and he shall rise again, soon, but for now... One hand tries to lift as though he might clumsily brush away the piece of grass which continues to tickle at his ear, as though this is just a lazing nap in the breaths between one battle and the next, between the gore and the gallantry, laughter echoing across upturned fields from familiar friends...

Oh, it rushes to him, it falls like rain, a thousand needs and wants and fading dreams. A deluge of memory strips abruptly short with the realization of incompletion, that any last goodbyes, or sweet remeets, or days of reminiscence have been cut away. All he had imagined would be has been overwritten by what is, and he will no longer be privy nor participant in the events of their futures.

He draws in a shuddered breath, and now his lips tremble for the sudden loss that pours over him like a chill. His aches are for more than his wounds. His fingers curl in the dry grasses swathed in mud and red, and the sun pours down as though hoping to ease his agonies. What will those, his dearest companions, hear? What will carry the echo of his legacy into the distant future of his bold and beloved country, on what grounds will he find recollection in their minds? Will they leave him behind in this field, mourned only in quiet hearts, or will they sing songs to him familiar pubs as free men and share his finest moments to fondly patient wives and rapt progeny? Will he be laid to rest with his intentions, another soldier in an unmarked grave, or will they carry his demand forward, lift the mantle, give every man, every woman, every child the freedom so deserved--

Another breath drags past his lips as though wresting air from the rest of the world just to fill his heavy lungs, and there’s salt on his tongue. He tries to swallow it away, used to the burst of blood in his mouth to remind him of life after a fight, but the taste of gunpowder continues to linger in the back of his throat. His racing mind, grasping at questions, leaves him with a deep-set exhaustion in his bones. But, finding some strength reserved within his soul, he turns his head just so, trying to see, to discern, if--

If what, Jacky, he asks himself, fingers curling in the earth beneath him. South Carolina creeps under his dirtied fingernails. Silence echoes in the lull of insects across the field and no cannons rumble, no horses scream, no men call out for mothers in the distance-- so he knows well beyond truth that he’s alone in this. His war has ended here, and his nation’s war has moved on. Every man finds himself alone in the last, or so his father has always promised. (Though it often had been followed by reassurances that there would be those around him to hand him away into the after, when his mother found him weeping for the fear of it.) But now he sees the brutal honesty in Henry Laurens’ words-- There’s no one there, not now. He remembers weeping at his mother’s bedside, all too suddenly. She’d been so weak, and all of the blood between her legs promised no recovery. He’d been there, but, too far gone, she hadn’t been able see him.

His coat burnishes with purple, rather than the rich burnt red that had stained his parents’ bed, a bruise draped on his body. It once had been a distinct shade of blue, which he recalls picking out while on the rush of victory in their grasp, hands (then, not bloodied nor aching) moving over a fabric his father had called ‘austere.’ The word had drawn a shiver to his very bones. His fingers (now, blooded and aching) skate that same fabric now ruined, catching on frayed holes fresh chewed by musket fire. The coat, so recently commissioned, lies in ruin with him. His hand goes still, fingers caught in the snarl of fabric, held fast in bullet holes as his arm loses what strength he had mustered for this exploration. Though he may dispute and debate the legitimacy of his finality, the affirmation resides firmly on the back of his tongue. 

He reclines in a tableau of defeat, with the slow realization of things unfinished-- a painting with some shapes undefined and left to wonderment. With clarity, he recalls the stack of letters he had allowed to build on his desk in the prior weeks, too caught up in the work of integrating himself back into the daily tasks of helping his father run the Laurens estate and care for the Laurens family. Letter-writing always ended up falling to the wayside of his intentions, with so many other things to be actively done, such as selecting horses to fill the stables, waiting up in the wan hours of the night to lay out plans of abolition where his father could not catch him, as though his father’s simple word could not cut down the entire contract without him even having opportunity to offer it to signature-- 

Alexander waits for another letter that he once again has forgotten to pen. He had not yet broken the wax seal on his dear lion’s latest.

John Laurens has not the strength in him to stop the tears, tears that could very well drown out the last of his light. What fate, to be felled by bullets and buried by his own grief! His mouth trembles, chapped lips parting as he breathes with a mortal wheeze, and his vision blurs rapidly. A count of moments pass - one, two, three - and he’s still aware of the sunshine and the burn in his eyes and the choke in his throat from mourning, still here enough to weep for the loss of things he had been so ignorant of... They had fought so hard, all of them, and he knows the strides taken could never be a tarry with naught to show. But so many possibilities remain unfinished, so many things he hasn’t done-- Could he just have a quill, a scrap of paper, for a moment--

His hand drops again from the pleading request to empty, humid air, and his throat aches from the attempt to speak. As though he could call out to the unforgiving present and find himself with a physician and an aide at hand to present last rights and last will be done--

What will happen to sweet Francis? So small, so far away across an ocean in a world now separate from his own. His mind had cultivated plans to visit his lawful wife and singular child, after so many years of thinking of them, passing them by for the sake of his patriotism and dream-- All of this had been like a treatise on the far shelf, one he had promised to read another day for the sake of garnering knowledge he knew useful but felt unnecessary. How old was she now? Did she have his eye, his hair, his mind? His tenacity? Would she be a child unfettered by the cruelty of this world, without her Papa to show her the steps to take-- would she miss the man she knew of but never met?

The cicadas begin their roar anew.  
The hymnal swells.

He closes his eyes because he cannot kept them open a moment longer, feeling as though his head lolls, the earth askew and rotation lost to the wild of the careless sea. He knows, with distant awareness between moments of blissful ignorance, that he will drown, here, in his own blood and his own tears and his own foolishness, drown on dry land with his own life, choked out in the invariable deep of his chest. The tree crickets sing and his mother brushes errant curls from his face as she encourages him to listen. 

His moments begin come as hiccups, tight, constricting, the heel of one boot digging into the earth as though, if he just pushes hard enough, he can bring himself from that brink and find new opportunity in the sun. Some helpless thought sparks with the idea that he can dust away the earth and try to dab the purple of his coat back to the sky’s rich tone.

( _ Alexander _ .)

His fingers curl, weak, to hold to damp and heavy fabric, remembering the sweetness of kisses exchanged in a downpour.

He sinks. His fingers release. His boot tips into the dust.

But his hand lifts, just so, fingers extended.

Raise a glass to freedom...


End file.
